Shoeless for airport safety

On a bright summer day, there is nothing like strolling bare foot down the airy corridors of the airport to the metal detectors.
It used to be so easy to hop a plane and fly across the country. We would arrive minutes before departure, toss our luggage at the agent, hastily confess that no one had handed us any mysterious package, run to the gate and dash down the folding tunnel between the terminal and plane just as the agent announced, “this is the final boarding call for flight 646 to Atlanta.” I even kept my shoes on through the whole process.
It isn’t like that anymore.
The only people running through the airports these days are those in danger of missing a connecting flight. Passengers do not wait with family and friends at the flight gate anymore. Hugs and kisses are exchanged in the car, at the ticket kiosk or outside the baggage claim area – because unticketed persons are prohibited from passing through the metal detectors to the flight gates.
No one asks if you have received any mysterious package from a stranger. Everything I carry on, check in or have on my person undergoes at least the scrutiny of the metal detector.
In the week after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, security guards hastily set-up eight-foot long folding tables to hold luggage for inspection. Pocket change went into plastic bowls or baskets from the discount department store to be handed around the thin frame of the metal detectors. I packed with the image of luggage inspectors rummaging through my unmentionables.
A few months later when my sister flew to visit us, her suitcase underwent one of the random, thorough luggage search. The disheveled wrapping on a gift she had carefully wrapped and packed validated the reality of that inspection.
Passing the metal detector test is easy – deposit any jewelry, barrettes, sandals with small buckles or shoes with metal insoles and spare change into a gray bin for the x-ray techs to explore their deep, dark metallic secrets. Thanks to design artists, engineers, safety managers, construction crews and sales staffs for safety devices the process and equipment has become more formidable. The thin plastic bowl is now a heavy plastic container with a weighted bottom that rides on a conveyor belt through the x-ray machine. Even the metal detectors stand more solidly in our path.
Having “checked in an hour ahead of flight time” as instructed, passengers tend to stay in the ”passengers only” waiting areas. Leaving the area means undergoing the whole process again.
We had to leave the sanitized passengers area recently for overnight stay in Atlanta. The next morning guards forbade our going straight from point A (entrance) to point B (our gate). They directed us down the long hall to the milling crowd of people waiting to go be processed through the metal detectors.
Black webbed guide lines directed overlapping lines of passengers. The morass of people ahead of us, assured me we would be late. A security guard loudly, repeatedly, greeted each wave of passengers entering the hall with the command, “Get your ticket and ID out and have them ready.” Another guard handed out plastic zipper pouches and admonished us to put jewelry, change and other small items into the bag.
We all obediently stripped off, zipped up, pulled out and shuffled along meekly through the snaking black rope guides hoping our obedience would insure a quick passage through the portals to our plane.
It wasn’t exactly a bare foot stroll through the park, but within minutes we reached the final guard, handed over our ticket and ID, tiptoed through the metal detector without a beep and were approved for incarceration – I mean air transportation.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)